TIME TO SHIFT FROM GAS TO ELECTRIC

The West Asia war has reminded us of the peril of depending on cooking gas imports. This is the right time to boost the National Efficient Cooking Programme launched in 2023 to promote electric cooking. The Ujjwala scheme can be used to support it

- 

IVEN the turmoil in West Asia, ensuring a sufficient supply of affordable liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) for cooking has emerged as a national priority. India currently imports roughly two-thirds of its LPG, which is used by over 33 crore households for cooking daily. About 90 percent of this LPG came from West Asian countries in 2025, led by the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), connecting over 10 crore low-income households to LPG, is nearing a decade of its completion, and remains one of India’s most consequential welfare programmes. When PMUY was launched in 2016, LPG was the best option for a mass-scale clean cooking pro-gramme given that India was still upgrading its electricity infrastructure to provide electricity reliably for lighting, cooling, industry and agriculture.

India’s power supply has improved significantly since then. Now urban and rural areas receive over 23 and 22 hours of uninterrupted supply daily, respectively, and the grid managed a record peak demand of 250 gigawatts during April-June 2024. Hence, given the volatility of LPG supply, it is time to push for electric cooking—using induction cooktops and electric pressure cookers. PMUY was designed to move poor households away from traditional polluting chulhaburning firewood; a hybrid clean cooking stack of gas and electricity sustains the health gains from PMUY, while insulating the country from imported supply shocks.

A costly deal getting costlier